Kung Fu Killforce [uDG 2011]

The fix is to have it chdir to Resources rather than the directory containing the app bundle.

Oh frak, yeah that's what's happening. Also my rickety-ass resource loading also looks in Kungfu Killforce.app. The best part is it's probably running fine because it can find MOST of the resources in the OTHER app bundle, until it tries playing a new sound I added just for this build.

I'll throw in a chdir-- this isn't the first time something like this has bit me in the ass

Sorry for the quick post to update, been crunching straight for the last few days and have to immediately run out the door

The first GM build of Kung Fu Killforce is up on the contest entry page! I'd love it if you guys could give it a spin and make sure there aren't any major crashes. I'll be fixing stuff up for the (real) deadline tomorrow night and also making a few tweaks here and there, depending on what you guys find.

Awesome. The only real issue I had was the lack of even an occasional health item, as it added a lot more stress artificially and kept me to standing far away in a quiet corner and camping out in one spot as the enemies approached, which killed the mood.

Edit: Ah, I noticed that there is a *small* health gain, not very noticeable though :/ imo, it feels like I should feel like I'm ready for the next round, or at least half of a round, when I get the chicken, not like "Oh, I can take 2-4 more hits now"

Ran on my 10.6.8 MacBook. It feels very chaotic though it's the sort of game where you get into a meditative rhythm when you play for a while. The different styles feel somewhat unbalanced (as long as you don't have to deal with aerial enemies, mantis appears to make you invincible during the special) and it feels like there's not a lot of reason to use your regular attacks since you can just spam the special without it running out or costing you anything. Maybe if you reverted back to 'normal' after a time period or a number of specials it would encourage the player to learn the basic attacks. As Oddity mentioned it is sort of odd there are conflicting goals between beating the game (turtle to save life) versus getting a high score (kill as many things as possible) Is there a reason progress is based on time instead of waves?

Actually, I've found that the time vs points factor helps establish a real goal of getting as many points as possible within that time, while also giving tension to stay alive before the emperor dude comes down to get his slice of the asskick. That aspect works really well. Waves would restrict much of that feeling of climbing awesomeness and would reduce a sense of getting through dudes as fast as possible. It's just that the lack of a breather brings more tension that feels artificial. In other words, it feels like I'm on two timers, one which will drain every second, and one which will pretty much always drain each time I jump into a crowd of dudes and get hit faster than I can kill, when there should really only be one timer.

Quote:In other words, it feels like I'm on two timers, one which will drain every second, and one which will pretty much always drain each time I jump into a crowd of dudes and get hit faster than I can kill, when there should really only be one timer.

The game intentionally uses a combination of waves and a timer-- I wanted to try something a little new this time around and put a twist on the straight up survival mechanic of more typical arcade games like Kill Dr. Cote. Without the timer, one could theoretically find a place to turtle up and survive infinitely. Without health, you can kinda just go ape with reckless abandon. With both, you have to balance the urgent need to kill as quickly as possible with the need to stay alive and preserve health. The intention is to get players to learn the patterns and skill AND be able to execute them as quickly as possible.

It's an unfamiliar mechanic, though, and I'm looking into ways of helping convey that more easily, or find another twist that makes the whole thing more familiar. The idea I'm kicking around now involves replacing the game timer with "Boss In: 5:00" and spawning the boss as normal. When you beat him, instead of the game ending, it would go into some sort of crazy apocalyptic kill screen mode, spawning insane amounts of dudes and chaos and the idea is to just survive as long as you can, but it's designed to end the game very quickly. The goal could be helped along by say the ceiling of the dojo caving in and earthquakes and such. Kind of like if the world were to suddenly killscreen What do you guys think?

Quote: The different styles feel somewhat unbalanced (as long as you don't have to deal with aerial enemies, mantis appears to make you invincible during the special) and it feels like there's not a lot of reason to use your regular attacks since you can just spam the special without it running out or costing you anything.

Yeah, this is a balance problem. I'm looking into adding a windup or a cooldown period after those attacks to help balance them out a little bit, because just spamming tiger, crane or mantis back and forth is kinda broken. And the shurikens shall be buffed!

One idea for overall presentation: put all text in Japanese characters, especially the "XX hit" combo, and the "Wave." Maybe have it fade from English to Japanese, or have it flash to English occasionally near the beginning of the game. Would make it a more immersive Japanese feel to it.

Also, my keyboard layout is dvorak, and it seems it grabs the keycaps from dvorak even when I switch to US Qwerty layout. Might want to look into that.

(Oct 6, 2011 10:53 AM)JustinFic Wrote: The game intentionally uses a combination of waves and a timer-- I wanted to try something a little new this time around and put a twist on the straight up survival mechanic of more typical arcade games like Kill Dr. Cote. Without the timer, one could theoretically find a place to turtle up and survive infinitely. Without health, you can kinda just go ape with reckless abandon. With both, you have to balance the urgent need to kill as quickly as possible with the need to stay alive and preserve health. The intention is to get players to learn the patterns and skill AND be able to execute them as quickly as possible.

I think since my personal goal was to beat the boss instead of getting a high score, my degenerate strategy of trying not to advance enemy waves in order to conserve health felt sort of odd, though possibly most people won't play the game this way.

(Oct 6, 2011 10:53 AM)JustinFic Wrote: It's an unfamiliar mechanic, though, and I'm looking into ways of helping convey that more easily, or find another twist that makes the whole thing more familiar. The idea I'm kicking around now involves replacing the game timer with "Boss In: 5:00" and spawning the boss as normal. When you beat him, instead of the game ending, it would go into some sort of crazy apocalyptic kill screen mode, spawning insane amounts of dudes and chaos and the idea is to just survive as long as you can, but it's designed to end the game very quickly. The goal could be helped along by say the ceiling of the dojo caving in and earthquakes and such. Kind of like if the world were to suddenly killscreen What do you guys think?

That sounds like a good way for high score junkies to get even unpredictably higher numbers, which would be interesting.

(Oct 8, 2011 06:07 PM)funkboy Wrote: One idea for overall presentation: put all text in Japanese characters, especially the "XX hit" combo, and the "Wave." Maybe have it fade from English to Japanese, or have it flash to English occasionally near the beginning of the game. Would make it a more immersive Japanese feel to it.

Oooo, good call. I may have it ONLY be in Chinese if we're talking the hit counter and wave counter-- those seem fairly intuitive/familiar enough that people could figure it out without needing to see the english at all. The "DEAD" text could also be in Chinese and I think it would still get the point across.

(Oct 8, 2011 06:07 PM)funkboy Wrote: Also, my keyboard layout is dvorak, and it seems it grabs the keycaps from dvorak even when I switch to US Qwerty layout. Might want to look into that.

Quote:That's an SDL problem, I've never found an easy fix for it.

That's decidedly inconvenient :/ I think the ideal answer is to just have a screen to set controls, similar to Street Fighter, where it just runs down the commands and you hit a key for each one. If it took arbitrary joystick input, that would solve that problem too.

Quote:I think since my personal goal was to beat the boss instead of getting a high score, my degenerate strategy of trying not to advance enemy waves in order to conserve health felt sort of odd, though possibly most people won't play the game this way.

Yeah, right now, you can theoretically just continually evade the first wave of dudes for 5 minutes and face the boss with full health. Your resulting score will be low (~100k if you win) so my opinion so far has been if players want to play that way, that's totally fine. Players that go all out and kill dudes will outscore that almost every time.

My main concern though with that is if players just evade, kill the boss, and then put the game down, thinking they've "beaten" it. Something like a killscreen (or any other mechanic that allows the game to keep going after the boss is dead) might be enough to let the player know that a boss kill isn't the game's ultimate goal.

Or at least that's what I'm hoping! My goal is to have a timed game a la Deadline in Geometry Wars, but punctuated with a cool climactic boss battle, and STILL have it be perceived as a score attack game.